Harold Meyerson reviews a new book that uses science (science!) to determine what strategies for increasing voter turnout actually work:
The late Alan Baron, sometime political consultant and full-time political wag, used to tell a story about a campaign kibitzer in Des Moines in the autumn of 1964. Every day as the election drew closer, the kibitzer would turn up at Democratic Party headquarters and implore the directors of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation to use sound trucks. Such trucks, he insisted, if properly used--touring the streets of Des Moines while amplified voices urged the folks on the sidewalks to vote Democratic--were guaranteed to tilt the election in the Democrats' favor. And on Election Day, in no small part just to shut the guy up, the field directors did dispatch a couple of sound trucks to ride around town.
And Sasha Abramsky writes about how our brains' imperfect design compromises our decisions:
The human mind, we like to think, is an embodiment of perfection. For those with a religious inclination, our ability to think through issues logically, to construct narratives about our surroundings, and to recall events that happened decades earlier is proof positive of a divine hand at work. For the nonreligious, the mind is a secular miracle, an indication that, left to its own devices, evolution produces something akin to a Panglossian vision of the best outcomes in the best of all possible worlds.
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--The Editors
